Counterfactuality and past Abstract Many languages have past-and-counterfactuality markers such as English simple past. There have been various attempts to find a common definition for both uses, but I will argue in this paper that they all have problems with (a) ruling out unacceptable interpretations, or (b) accounting for the contrary-to-fact implicature of counterfactual conditionals, or (c) predicting the observed cross-linguistic variation, or a combination thereof. By combining insights from two basic lines of reasoning, I will propose a simple and transparent approach that solves all the observed problems and offers a new understanding of the concept of counterfactuality.

How important are truth-conditions for truth-conditional semantics? Abstract In this paper, I argue that while truth-conditional semantics in generative linguistics provides lots of good semantic explanations, truth-conditions do not play an important role in these explanations. That is, the fact that expressions have the particular truthconditional contents (extensions or intensions) they have does not even partly explain facts about semantic phenomena. Rather, explanations of semantic phenomena appeal to extra-truth-conditional properties attributed to expressions via their lexical entries. Focusing on recent truth-conditional work on gradable adjectives and degree modifiers by Kennedy and McNally (Language 81:345–381, 2005), I show that the best explanations of semantic anomaly and entailment for these expressions are non-truth-conditional—they do not depend on the fact that these expressions have the truth-conditional contents they have. I then provide reasons for thinking that the point generalizes beyond gradable adjectives and degree modifiers to other expressions, and beyond anomaly and entailment to other semantic phenomena. Truth-conditional content, generally, is extrasemantic.

Tasting and testing Abstract Our main concern in this paper is the semantics of predicates of personal taste. However, in order to see these predicates in the right perspective, we had to broaden the scope to the wider class of relative gradable adjectives. We present an analysis of the meaning of these adjectives in the framework of update semantics. In this framework the meaning of a sentence is not identified with its truth conditions, but with its (potential) impact on people’s intentional states. In this respect, an important characteristic of relative gradable adjectives is the interplay between their evaluative features and people’s expectations. The dynamic set-up also makes it possible (a) to model the interpretation of a relative gradable adjective without supposing that the context always supplies a ‘cut-off’ point determining its application, and (b) to deal in a pragmatic way with situations in which the Sorites paradox arises.

In defense of an HPSG-based theory of non-constituent coordination: a reply to Kubota and Levine Abstract We show that Kubota and Levine’s (Linguist Philos 38:521–576, 2015) characterization of the HPSG-based theory of non-constituent coordination proposed in Yatabe (in: Flickinger, Kathol (eds) Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, CSLI, Stanford, pp 325–344, 2001) and later works is inaccurate, and that the theory in question does not require any ad hoc mechanisms to account for the long-known fact that right-node raising and left-node raising can affect semantic interpretation. In the course of demonstrating this, we fill in some details of this HPSG-based theory that were left unspecified in the previous literature, and we also present novel accounts of split-antecedent relative clauses and of respectively interpretation that are consistent with the theory. Furthermore, we argue that the phenomenon of summative agreement may provide a reason to prefer this theory over CG-based theories like Kubota and Levine’s.

Varieties of Sobel sequences Abstract In this paper I provide a unified analysis of a number of pragmatic anomalies that have been discussed in the literature. The paper’s main goal is to account for Sobel sequences of conditionals and sequences of disjunctive sentences, but I will also propose that this analysis can be extended to sequences of sentences with superlatives. The starting point is the observation that, while all these sequences are felicitous in one order, they are infelicitous when the order is reversed. Previous proposals have focussed on particular types of infelicitous sequences (e.g. von Fintel, in: Kenstowicz (ed) Ken Hale: A life in language, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001; Moss in Noûs 46:516–586, 2012; Lewis in Noûs 52:481–507, 2018; a.o.), or a subset of all the phenomena cited above (e.g. Singh in On competition between only and exh, 2008b; Linguist Philos 31:245–260, 2008c; Dohrn, in: Pistoia-Reda, Domaneschi (eds) Linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches on implicatures and presuppositions. Palgrave McMillan, Basingstoke, 2017; a.o.). I propose that sequences of sentences belonging to the same structured set of alternatives T are subject to a Specificity Constraint (SC): sequences are acceptable if both alternatives are dominated by the same number of nodes in the structured set of alternatives T. Violations of SC can be avoided by strengthening the weaker alternative. However, covert strengthening violates an economy condition if the overtly stronger alternative is among those made salient by the preceding utterance in the sequence (if any). I propose that the set of alternatives made salient by an utterance of a sentence s consists of s’s sisters and mother in T. I will show that the strengthening mechanism varies depending on the kind of sequence we have.

Signalling games, sociolinguistic variation and the construction of style Abstract This paper develops a formal model of the subtle meaning differences that exist between grammatical alternatives in socially conditioned variation (called variants) and how these variants can be used by speakers as resources for constructing personal linguistic styles. More specifically, this paper introduces a new formal system, called social meaning games (SMGs), which allows for the unification of variationist sociolinguistics and game-theoretic pragmatics, two fields that have had very little interaction in the past. Although remarks have been made concerning the possible usefulness of game-theoretic tools in the analysis of certain kinds of socially conditioned linguistic phenomena (Goffman in Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1961; in Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face interaction, Aldine, Oxford, 1967; in Strategic interaction, vol 1, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1970; Bourdieu in Soc Sci Inf 16(6):645–668, 1977; Dror et al. in Lang Linguist Compass 7(11):561–579, 2013; in Lang Linguist Compass 8(6):230–242, 2014; Clark in Meaningful games: Exploring language with game theory, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014, among others), a general framework uniting game-theoretic pragmatics and quantitative sociolinguistics has yet to be developed. This paper constructs such a framework through giving a formalization of the Third Wave approach to the meaning of variation (see Eckert in Ann Rev Anthropol 41:87–100, 2012, for an overview) using signalling games (Lewis in Convention, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1969) and a probabilistic approach to speaker/listener beliefs of the kind commonly used in the Bayesian game-theoretic pragmatics framework (see Goodman and Lassiter in Probabilistic semantics and pragmatics: Uncertainty in language and thought. Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, Wiley, Hoboken, 2014; Franke and Jäger in Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 35(1):3–44, 2016, for recent overviews).

Attitudes and ascriptions in Stalnaker models Abstract What role, if any, should centered possible worlds play in characterizing the attitudes? Lewis (Philos Rev 88(4):513–543, 1979) argued (in effect) that, in order to account for the phenomena of self-location (Perry in Philos Rev 86(4):474–497, 1977, Noûs 13(1):3–21, 1979), the contents of the attitudes should be taken to be centered propositions (i.e. sets of centered worlds). Stalnaker (Our knowledge of the internal world, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008, in: Brown, Cappelen (eds) Assertion: New philosophical essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, Context, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), however, has argued that while centered worlds are needed to characterize e.g. belief states, the contents of such states should be understood as ordinary, uncentered propositions (cf. Hintikka in Knowledge and belief, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1962). But Stalnaker does not, as is common, provide a semantics of attitude ascriptions based on the models he develops of the attitudinal states themselves. This paper begins to explore the prospects for doing so. It argues that a simple but well-motivated approach does not yield the principles of knowledge and belief Stalnaker endorses; and that a modification which does brings with it worries of its own surrounding communication and learnability. A technical appendix contains novel and pertinent results in doxastic/epistemic logic.

Manifest validity and beyond: an inquiry into the nature of coordination and the identity of guises and propositional-attitude states Abstract This manuscript focuses on a problem for Millian Russellianism raised by Fine (Semantic relationism, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007: 82): “[Assuming] that we are in possession of the information that a Fs and the information that a Gs, it appears that we are sometimes justified in putting this information ‘together’ and inferring that a both Fs and Gs. But how?” It will be my goal to determine a Millian-Russellian solution to this problem. I will first examine Nathan Salmon’s (“Recurrence”, Philos Stud 159:407–441, 2012) Millian-Russellian solution, which appeals to a non-semantic and subjective notion of coordination defined in terms of guises. I will object that in order to convincingly solve a specific version of Fine’s problem (the “Bruce” case), identity conditions for guises must be provided. On the other hand, the most plausible way to individuate guises is by means of the equivalence classes (if any) of coordination itself. But, if so, the guise-based strategy to solve Fine’s problem risks being circular; in addition, there are serious doubts that coordination is transitive. An alternative Millian-Russellian solution to Fine’s problem will then be explored, which gives up guises and employs, instead, a non-semantic and subjective relation of coordination not defined in terms of guises, along with occurrences of Russellian propositions of a special sort, for which identity conditions will be provided and via which token attitude states intuitively more fine-grained than guises will be individuated.

Occasion-sensitive semantics for objective predicates Abstract In this paper I propose a partition semantics (Groenendijk and Stokhof in Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatics of answers, Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam, 1984) for sentences containing objective predicates that takes into account the phenomenon of occasion-sensitivity associated with so-called Travis cases (Travis in Occasion-sensitivity: Selected essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008). The key idea is that the set of worlds in which a sentence is true has a more complex structure as a result of different ways in which it is made true. Different ways may have different capacities to support the attainment of a contextually salient domain goal. I suggest that goal-conduciveness decides whether some utterance of a sentence is accepted as true on a particular occasion at a given world. The utterance will not be accepted as true at a world which belongs to a truth-maker which is less conducive to a contextually salient goal than other truth-makers. Finally, the proposed occasion-sensitive semantics is applied to some cases of disagreement and cancellability.

Reference to ad hoc kinds Abstract Although there is no consensus about what kinds are, there is a common understanding that kinds can be regarded as collections of objects that share certain properties. What these properties exactly are is often left unspecified. This paper explores the semantics of ad hoc kind-referring terms, where the determination of the relevant set of shared properties does not rely on “natural” properties or world knowledge. Rather, information provided by a nominal modifier, typically a relative clause, is used to impute the required regular behavior on the kind-referring NP. Building on Carlson’s (Reference to kinds in English, Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1977b) disjointness condition, I show that we can not only account for the ubiquity of these expressions, but we can also extend the analysis to other constructions that have traditionally not been taken to be kind referring, such as Amount and Degree Relative constructions.